Gone-Girl-by-Gillian-Flynn

the one who will end up with a pie in the puss, the whipped cream wilting his
upturned collar as everyone in the cafeteria cheers.
He doesn’t act that way, though. His name is Nick. I love it. It makes him
seem nice, and regular, which he is. When he tells me his name, I say, ‘Now,
that’s a real name.’ He brightens and reels off some line: ‘Nick’s the kind of
guy you can drink a beer with, the kind of guy who doesn’t mind if you puke
in his car. Nick!’
He makes a series of awful puns. I catch three fourths of his movie
references. Two thirds, maybe. (Note to self: Rent The Sure Thing.) He refills
my drink without me having to ask, somehow ferreting out one last cup of the
good stuff. He has claimed me, placed a flag in me: I was here first, she’s
mine, mine. It feels nice, after my recent series of nervous, respectful postfeminist
men, to be a territory. He has a great smile, a cat’s smile. He should
cough out yellow Tweety Bird feathers, the way he smiles at me. He doesn’t
ask what I do for a living, which is fine, which is a change. (I’m a writer, did I
mention?) He talks to me in his river-wavy Missouri accent; he was born and
raised outside of Hannibal, the boyhood home of Mark Twain, the inspiration
for Tom Sawyer. He tells me he worked on a steamboat when he was a
teenager, dinner and jazz for the tourists. And when I laugh (bratty, bratty
New York girl who has never ventured to those big unwieldy middle states,
those States Where Many Other People Live), he informs me that Missoura is
a magical place, the most beautiful in the world, no state more glorious. His
eyes are mischievous, his lashes are long. I can see what he looked like as a
boy.
We share a taxi home, the streetlights making dizzy shadows and the car
speeding as if we’re being chased. It is one a.m. when we hit one of New
York’s unexplained deadlocks twelve blocks from my apartment, so we slide
out of the taxi into the cold, into the great What Next? and Nick starts
walking me home, his hand on the small of my back, our faces stunned by the
chill. As we turn the corner, the local bakery is getting its powdered sugar
delivered, funneled into the cellar by the barrelful as if it were cement, and we
can see nothing but the shadows of the deliverymen in the white, sweet cloud.
The street is billowing, and Nick pulls me close and smiles that smile again,
and he takes a single lock of my hair between two fingers and runs them all
the way to the end, tugging twice, like he’s ringing a bell. His eyelashes are
trimmed with powder, and before he leans in, he brushes the sugar from my
lips so he can taste me.